ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

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1. Introduction

In the academic field from which I study comics, rhetoric and
composition, we have a foundational narrative that we call "the
rhetorical tradition" – a story that traces the evolution of rhetoric
from ancient Greece and Rome, to the Renaissance, to the Scottish
Enlightenment, to American writing instruction, to the "rediscovery" of
ancient rhetoric, to today. It is seductive and its affordances are
great; and yet, it is highly Eurocentric and not contingent on its own
evidence.

Comics studies and the study of visual rhetoric have the opportunity
to do something different with the way we see our history and how we
got here. Our narratives often concern themselves with the value of
comics as objects of study and as a mode of communication, and we often
struggle with the lack of seriousness and complexity assigned to comics
work. Our histories are often highly Eurocentric, tracing the origins
of what we know as comics in Europe and the United States. Does it have
to be this way? We as comics scholars, in a young field of study, have
the opportunity to open up new modes of looking at our past and to take
a decolonial approach from very near the beginnings of our field.

Reading indigenous histories of rhetoric, of meaning-making
practices,
of history, and of writing provides a valuable insight into what comics
can do for us today. The multiplicity of histories can provide new ways
of reading comics texts, and places that suggest invention in new or
underused modes. They can help us ask what comics are or can be for,
and decolonize our thinking about comics studies.

2. Histories of Rhetoric

The Rhetorical Tradition can refer to both the
foundational narrative
of the academic field of Rhetoric and Composition and the mammoth text
used to teach it, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. In
their introduction to the work, they explain their approach and how
they trace "the historical development of rhetoric." It is divided into
"conventional chronological periods: the Classical (from about the
birth of rhetoric in ancient Greece to about 400 C.E.), the Medieval
(to about 1400), the Renaissance (to about 1700), the Enlightenment
(from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century), the
Nineteenth Century, and the Modern and Postmodern (the twentieth
century)" (1).

This narrative directs the attention of people who study
the history of rhetoric. It is required reading for most graduate
students being socialized into disciplinary conversations about
rhetoric and related areas. It silences by defining the scope of what
is the history of rhetoric, and of what is something else. It also
solely attributes the invention of rhetoric to ancient Greece, without
consideration of the independent development of writing systems and
accompanying strategies for effective use of said systems in other
ancient cultures.

Entire literate intellectual traditions are ignored to situate the
core
of the discipline in Western antiquity. This problem is not repaired by
adding a few people of color to the narrative, as has happened in later
editions of the text. Gloria Anzaldúa's critique of this narrative and
of ethnocentrism now appears at the very end of this book, page 1592 of
1673. What does it mean to situate a narrative about how the history of
writing also begins with the Aztecs' "tlilli, tlapalli" at the
very end
of the history, rather than the beginning?

What is required to really decolonize this narrative, and, by
rights,
the discipline of Rhetoric, is rethinking the history of writing and
whose traditions and literacies are important and significant. A
critical part of this decolonization is the serious consideration of
visual rhetoric, of pictographic and ideographic traditions,
as part of
this history: "tlilli, tlapalli, la tinta negra y roja de su códices
(the black and red ink painted on codices)," as identified by Anzaldúa,
is a visual cue, identifying writing by the metonymy of its color
(1591). The study of literate rhetorical productions of indigenous
people in the Americas is itself the study of the history of visual
rhetoric and its legitimacy as an intellectual practice.

The idea of codex rhetorics has developed out of the theoretical and
cultural work of Anzaldúa, at the intersection of Chicano/a Studies and
Native Studies; these texts and practices have been studied before, but
by anthropology, archaeology, or history. Naming them as rhetoric
cements their connection to writing practices historical and
contemporary.

What are casually referred to as Mexican or Aztec codices
are really a group of rhetorical practices done by people in the
Americas prior to and contemporaneously with colonization. According to
Miguel Leon-Portilla, "Mayas, Mixtecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs succeeded in
developing their own systems of writing" (xlv). Mexica (Aztec) texts
were referred to as amoxtli; Mayan texts were called vuh
(Mignolo,
"Signs" 222-223). Significantly, all of these texts were highly
pictographic (for example, Mexica texts were constituted by "a
combination of pictographic, ideographic, and partially phonetic
characters or glyphs" [Leon-Portilla xlv]). In Mexica traditions, "in
xochitl, in cuicatl," or "flower and song," was used as a
metaphor to
refer to the beautiful use of language by poets and scholars, or wise
men (tlamantinime) (Mignolo, Darker Side 97).
Fewer than thirty
pre-contact examples of these texts exist today, due to their mass
destruction during colonization, along with about fifty others
contemporaneous with colonization (Chagoya n. pag.).

In a broad sense, much of this theoretical and historical work
challenges definitions of literacy. Along with Anzaldúa, the
semiotician and scholar of colonial history Walter Mignolo is a
theorist whose work is crucial to subverting colonialist narratives of
rhetoric. In his crucial work The Darker Side of the
Renaissance:
Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Mignolo explodes the
role
of language in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. "The
relationship between discourse and power during colonial expansion" is
contingent, in his analysis, on competing and conflictive literacies,
on the presupposition by the Spanish that letters can tame speech (but
pictographs cannot), and on the very definition of "book" itself (7,
42). Mignolo draws a distinction between utterly different conceptions
of reading: the western notion of "reading the word," of discerning,
and the indigenous notion of "reading the world," of reading as
discerning meaning from something perceived rather than decoded. It is
these theories of reading visually that lead most productively into
comics-related analysis.

3. Indigeneity and Comics Studies

The preceding critiques of the received history of Rhetoric are
thoroughly grounded in Native Studies and ideas of indigeneity. There
exists previous scholarship that makes the connection between comics
and indigenous people, but it seldom makes the connection to visual
rhetoric. The most prominent stance taken is that of the stereotype
collector: this mode of analysis looks at images of Native Americans
and indigenous people and evaluates the qualities of their portrayal.
The evaluations given can be negative, positive, accurate, inaccurate,
racist, gendered, or more nuanced descriptions. Michael A. Sheyashe's
Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study is
currently the only
book-length work that applies this approach specifically to comic
books, and scholars including Audrey Schwartz have attempted to build
on this work in rhetorical directions. As comics studies develops its
breadth, critiques of portrayals of indigenous people such as Melissa
L. Mellon's "Our Minds in the Gutters: Sexuality, History, and Reader
Responsibility in George O'Connor's Graphic Novel Journey into Mohawk
Country" may become more common. As yet, they are still rare.

There are even fewer historical or theoretical works on comics that
incorporate indigenous approaches and concerns. Oddly, one of the few
places where an indigenous text is taken seriously in a comics studies
context is in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. The
book that has
been a gateway to the analysis of comics for so many of us begins with
an analysis of several sequential visual texts in order to develop a
formalist definition of comics. One of these is the Aztec narrative of
8-Deer Ocelot's Claw. McCloud reads the text (as translated by Alfonso
Caso) and proclaims that it is, in fact, a work of comics. He moves on
to call the Bayeux tapestry comics, and Egyptian tomb painting, and
European printmaking (10-19).

The global perspective utilized in this brief portion of the work
acts
as a legitimizing narrative for the existence of "juxtaposed pictorial
and other images in deliberate sequence" (9). McCloud naturalizes the
production of comics by attributing them to cultures across the globe,
spanning thousands of years. In fact, it may be seen as a colonial act
to use indigenous work as part of your foundational narrative, but then
never revisit the issue or give further consideration to the work
beyond appropriating it as part of your history.

Reading a few individual visual texts from a diversity of locations
outside of their cultural contexts is a surprisingly effective
introduction to a book largely about American, European, and Japanese
comics traditions. But, almost no one else in comics studies is running
around calling codices comic books, or vice versa. Robert C. Harvey has
criticized McCloud's definition of comics for including things that are
not recognizable as comics to a contemporary audience: "By his
definition, the Bayeux tapestry and Mexican codices are comics. So is
written Chinese. McCloud's definition includes what we call comics just
as "quadruped" includes horses" (75). It has become much more common to
define the beginning of comics' history as occurring with the
nineteenth century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer, who not only made
cartoons but wrote about how they should be constructed (Kunzle 17-23).

4. Visual Rhetorical Traditions

If you begin with the assertion that the thing contemporary readers
collectively recognize as comics first begins to be articulated in the
1830's by Töpffer, but that other things can still be meaningful
ancestors or predecessors, then how have we determined which ancestors,
which relations, it is important to pay attention to? Who have we paid
attention to in the past, and who and what are currently within our
scholarly attention? Throw a dart at current scholarship and you will
hit an American or a European, maybe a printmaker. There remain many
lacunae in this site of cultural memory, unraveled parts of this
tapestry. More needs to be said about past, present, and future
connections between comics as we know them and the history of visual
rhetoric.

I do not mean to imply that European printmakers should not be
explored
further in the context of this field of study: our discipline is so new
that branches can grow in any direction. In fact, I believe this kind
of work can invite parallel explorations of indigenous visual rhetoric
in a comics context. One particularly good example of this kind of work
is the Winter 2007 issue of ImageTexT itself, focused on
the works of
William Blake and their relation to the visual. The introduction to
that special issue gives a multifaceted justification of why a journal
focused on comics and cartoons would give a whole issue to something
that isn't either of those. "There is ...something deeper, however, a
Broglioian-Blakean-Deleuzian mole tunneling beneath contemporary comic
culture, driving creators to aesthetic innovation with visions of
brimstone and apocalyptic nightmares contesting the bourgeois dream
life of spandex-clad defenders of the status quo" (Whitson 3). The
connection between Blake and comics is weird but intuitive, and further
justified by W.J.T. Mitchell's conception of "imagetext" itself,
originally developed based on Blake (4).

William Blake did not make comics, but he did make imagetext, and
his
imagetext resonates with current makers of comics in many complicated
ways. Pre-conquest Mexica tlamantinime did not make comic
books either,
but they certainly did make imagetext, and the relationship between
ancient texts and contemporary texts can be constellated in a similar
way.

If amoxtli and vuh are not comics, how do we
talk about them in this
context? Imagetext is certainly available as a theoretical tool, but a
concept drawn from Mignolo may be more useful in a context laden with
cultural issues. In the preface to The Darker Side of the
Renaissance
he describes the impetus behind his frequent and recurring use of the
word "tradition" in the text. He invites the reader to understand a
tradition as "not something that is there to be remembered,
but the
process of remembering and forgetting itself" (xv). Traditions are
"a
multiplexed and filtered ensemble of acts of saying, remembering, and
forgetting..."traditions" are the loci where people are bonded in...ways
of organizing and conceiving themselves in a given space (by country or
border) by constructing an image of both the self and the other" (xv).

I propose a theory of visual rhetorical traditions – a tool to
investigate ways people are bonded in representing themselves and
others in a visual way. Visual rhetorical traditions need not be
unbroken chains of ways of doing; accessing Mignolo's conception,
traditions are also acts of remembering, forgetting, and reinscribing
and reforging memory. Looking at the connection between Blake and
comics is the remaking of a memory of cultural practices in our comics
community. Looking at the connections between codex rhetorics and
comics made today is an act of remembering.

This theory seeks to recognize and name commonalities in a broader
sense than comics form, although such structures can fall under this
umbrella. By that, I mean to extend this tool beyond the formalist
approaches widespread in comics studies right now. The use of panels
and certain conventionalized representations of space and time can be
one visual rhetorical tradition that we are making a memory of by
looking back to Töpffer; this theory encompasses any visual act of
saying that can be repeated and reused. This theory looks for
consistencies and strategies between texts or across them rather than
within any given iteration of a text.

The title of this paper, "Imagining a Multiplicity of Visual
Rhetorical
Traditions," suggests an alternative to "the Rhetorical Tradition" as
the locus of the history of writing. A multiplicity of traditions
stands as a kind of "pluritopic hermeneutic," in opposition to the
monotopic way of understanding history that currently dominates the
study of rhetoric (Mignolo 11). A theory of multiplicitous visual
rhetorical traditions has the potential to explore the relationship
between comics and other visual media that are not comics but exist in
a similar social location, or within a similar culture or discourse
community. Ways of making meaning through visual representation carry
across genre and form, yet formalist comics definitions deprecate
relationships across forms (possibly because comics have so often been
looked at as derivative of other forms).

As Mignolo says regarding tools: "We not only use a tool; we justify
its uses as selected from among many possibilities. The use of the tool
is as ideological as the descriptions intended to justify its use"
(24). This is an ideological description of an ideological tool: this
tool is intended for decolonial inquiry that decenters the teleological
history of writing in the west and values literacy in visual rhetorical
forms. Thus, I intend to focus my analysis specifically on the use of
indigenous visual rhetorical traditions rather than traditions
being
forged and rewoven by other comics scholars.

Indigenous visual rhetorical traditions can speak to many aspects of
comics. In a broad sense, they can ask the question of rhetorical
purpose: what are comics for? Can purposes currently being accessed
through the medium be complicated by these traditions, and can these
traditions serve as a springboard for invention of new modes of
comics?

Two comics-identified works within the reach of my analysis and
description speak back to these questions. (By "comics-identified," I
mean that the creators of the works have named them in their own words
as comics, and this analysis takes them at their word, without feeding
them through a definitional filter.) One work is an ambitious
collaborative project by a team of professionals with art-world
prestige, published and distributed at first on a small scale, and then
for the broader market through a large publisher. The other is a small
project for a micro-audience designed by me, the author of this paper,
specifically to put some of these theoretical ideas into practice. Both
of these works specifically access visual rhetorical traditions
exemplified by Mexica codex traditions in order to serve purposes not
often considered in the context of comics: they are works with a
functional relationship to memory as well as performance.

Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol
is a
collaborative book art project, self-identified by co-creator as a
"post-Columbian Spanglish comix/codex" (Gomez-Peña n. pag.). It is the
work of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a performance artist, Enrique Chagoya, a
painter and collage artist, and Felicia Rice, a book artist and
typographer. It was first printed in 1998 as a limited-edition artists
book, but later adapted for a wider printing. The original version of
the text was printed using amatl, or traditional Mexican bark
paper,
and letterpress. Felicia Rice observes in the introduction: "In a
sense, the printing process forced a compromise between a native
material and a tool of colonization, the printing press" (n. pag.). The
book has the accordion-fold form of the surviving Mexica codices, and
takes up many of the visual tropes of such works, including ways of
representing human figures. The book also collages liberally from the
American comics tradition, including snippets of Mickey Mouse and
Superman. (In particular, identifiable elements and dialogue quotes
from the Superman story "For the Man Who Has Everything," by Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons, appear, as well as references to the Death of
Superman story drawn by Dan Jurgens. See Figures 1 and 2.)

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In this excerpt from the 14th panel in right-to-left succession, Nezahualcoyotl, the Aztec "warrior and philosopher king" (Baca 65), struggles against Superman and Wonder Woman, accompanied by the counter-narrative of the Aztec colonist and Gomez-Peña creation, Europzin Tezpoca, who named Europe after himself.

I was first introduced to the book, and by extension to the opus of
Guillermo Gomez-Peña, through the work of Damián Baca. In his book
Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of
Writing, he
describes the book in detail in a chapter regarding Chicano codex
rhetorics: "By intertwining Mesoamerican pictography with Mexican
murals and Chicano iconography, codex rhetorics at once look back to
the Mesoamerican past while critiquing the present and inventing
possible shared futures" (79).

A theory of visual rhetorical traditions asks, what does this book
do?
How can understanding indigenous visual meaning-making practices and
uses of visual rhetoric enrich our understanding of this work and of
the rhetorical action it takes? In this case, key to appreciating the
work being done by Codex Espangliensis is some
understanding of the
role of performance in relationship to the reading of codexes, and of
Mexica notions of reading in general.

Codexes are notoriously "laconic texts," as described by Elizabeth
Hill
Boone. When trying to read one of these texts in the same way one would
read a contemporaneous European text, a great amount of detail seems to
be lacking. The images that communicate meaning seem very terse in
comparison. However, the idea of sitting down individually with a book
as an alphabetically literate individual and consuming a fully
conceived message transmitted by an author is antithetical to literacy
practices in this cultural context.

Codexes were not necessarily consumed by individuals, but rather,
were
performed by wise men who knew how to interpret their images in the
correct way, and knew where to elaborate on the seemingly laconic
images. The books were mnemonics for a larger performance: the images
acted as shorthand, capturing the essential details of topics such as
history and social order, while giving structure to the story. "[T]he
pictorial histories were read aloud to an audience, they were
interpreted, and their images were expanded and embellished in the
oration of a full story. The pictorial histories were painted
specifically to be the rough text of performance" (Boone "Aztec" 71).

Thus, I argue that Codex Espangliensis accesses this
visual rhetorical
tradition: the use of a laconic visual text as script and mnemonic for
a performance, rather than an intentionally autonomous work. I intend
for this interpretation to be additive, rather than dismissive of other
literary and rhetorical readings of the work. In a literal sense, the
book contains the script of a performance; but in a figurative way, the
book stands as a reforging of the connection between visual rhetoric
and performance, picking up comics elements along the way.

A further
commonality between his text and the indigenous texts produced
contemporaneously with colonization that Mignolo analyzes is the notion
of the "coexistence and conflicting interactions of alternative and
conflictive literacies" (Mignolo, "Signs" 273). Texts produced under
the watch of colonial powers combined the visual rhetorical traditions
of indigenous sign systems with alphabetic writing introduced as part
of the colonial project. Many of these texts document the conflict of
colonization itself as their subject. "Conflictive literacies" adroitly
describes the collision of word and image in Codex Espangliensis.
Words
are in some places bold and in other places barely legible, and are in
both Spanish and English; some of the text is denotative and some
imaginative, drawn from a performance by Gomez-Peña that reimagines
Europe being colonized by the people of the Americas.

The images of the
book are laden with violent conflict themselves. Superheroes collaged
from other contexts float through the work, engaged in bloody violence.
These interactions contain some text, also collaged from other comics
(including some very noticeable Alan Moore dialogue), and yet they do
not necessarily supply a complete sequential story. Even the order of
the pages itself is brought into question by a conflict of literacy
practices. Should the book be read from right to left or left to right?
The introduction to the text suggests that both happen at once, and
that the conflicting meanings produced by both readings, "in fragments
and in recurring episodes," reflect the way history itself unfolds
(Gonzales n. pag.). The laconic nature of the codex tradition once
again
comes to bear: while the images and their juxtapositions exist as
ambiguous, violent tableaux, they also serve as mnemonics of stories
that readers already know, whether they are comfortable being reminded
of them or not.

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In this excerpt from the 4th panel in right-to-left succession, the Virgin of Guadalupe is shown speaking the villain Mongul's dialogue from Alan Moore's famous Superman story, "For the Man Who Has Everything." Wonder Woman emerges from an anatomical diagram of a woman's torso, in an image collaged from that same comic. While the Virgin seems to be nodding prayerfully at Wonder Woman, they are attributed lines that are antithetical to each other. Is the Mexican religious icon set up to fight the representative of American popular culture? The image is ambiguous.

There is no uninterrupted history of codex-making practice that
connects the rhetorical work being done by Gomez-Peña, Chagoya, and
Rice with pre-conquest manuscripts. However, Codex Espangliensis
is a
massive act of memory, reaching into both American popular cultural
imagery and indigenous imagery to invent a way to represent the ongoing
struggles of colonialism in a way that is both new and old. The book
engages the rhetorical traditions of the Americas and transmits them to
future visual rhetors: by identifying itself as a work of comix, as
well as a codex, it suggests that memory work and performance work can
be tasks done by other visual texts.

Codex Espangliensis is the best mass-distributed work I
have
encountered that exemplifies this theory, in the context of indigenous
traditions. However, I began a comix-creating odyssey of my own around
the same time that I began working with this theory. I would like to
discuss one of my own works in order to further demonstrate how comics
and visual rhetoric can engage memory in productive and useful ways,
building off of indigenous rhetorical traditions.

In 2008, as part of a graduate seminar on the history and theory of
rhetoric taught by Dr. Malea Powell at Michigan State University, I had
the opportunity to create a synthetic final project. Rather than
writing seminar papers, we were assigned to create something more akin
to a "collage essay," where multiple voices, narratives, arguments, and
styles can intersect and overlap. However, the specific form and genre
of the piece we were to create was up to us: non-alphabetic projects
were welcomed.

Over the course of the semester, we had swept through
several thousand years of human history, moving from Aristotelian
rhetoric to Iroquois wampum hypertextual practices (Haas 77), and from
the Belle lettres era of rhetoric to the postmodern and
postcolonial
(or paracolonial) era. Since I was dealing with such a vast amount of
information, the critical faculty I wanted my final project to address
was memory. How do you remember all the things you have learned in such
a broad survey? The question deviled all of us in the course of the
semester. However, we also encountered memory as it lives in the
history of rhetoric, in Europe and in the Americas: in the "memory
palaces" and mnemonic devices used in medieval Europe to extend and
organize human memory before the dawn of print, and in the use of
sequential images in codexes to give "armature" to a work that relies
on human memory for its performance (Boone 55). Indeed, memory is often
described by rhetoricians as the "lost canon," as it was considered
crucial in ancient Greek rhetoric, but ascribed less significance as
time went on. However, as is conclusively demonstrated by scholars of
indigenous rhetorics such as Angela Haas and Damián Baca, memory
remains crucial to understanding the function of many indigenous
rhetorical traditions.

After much internal debate over what I actually wanted to make (my
original plan was to make a talking accordion-fold codex that used the
same technology as musical birthday cards, but I wasn't able to pull
that off), I wrote, drew, collaged, and assembled a 16-page zine
mini-comic. While the work is titled "Nonsense Comix 6: Oh shit, I'm in
grad school..." the purpose of the text is serious. Through weaving
sarcastic humor with allusions to the history of rhetoric, I attempted
to create a comic that was also a mnemonic for what we learned and
theorized together as a class over the course of a semester. I
transformed what I considered the most significant ideas from the
course into drawings and collaged images, as well as hand-lettered and
collaged text. Furthermore, the comic I created was an artifact that
would go home with each member of the class. It was my hope that the
comic I created would be useful as well as interesting, that
it would
be something that could be revisited as a trigger for our poor frazzled
grad student memories when we needed to remember something about, say,
Hugh Blair.

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Figure three shows the second inside page of the comic, and is an
example of a page that combines original drawings and text, along with
collage, to hold memories of many significant moments of learning. The
page takes its layout, with a primary image/text surrounded by small
blocked off images and texts, from the Codex Borgia, a pre-conquest
divinatory manuscript. First and foremost, the page contains my
personal definition of rhetoric being spoken aloud by a human figure
(creating such a definition was an assignment in the course): "the
multiplicity of voices and images engaged in making meaning." Below
this definition is an image of a bird saying, "This is a thing you do
in grad school. You define things. Kenneth Burke talked about man as
the symbol-using animal, goaded by hierarchy, but he could have as
easily meant grad students." The bird is intended to be the wren
mentioned at the very beginning of Burke's "Definition of Man."

Surrounding this primary panel are other mnemonic images and quotes
referencing other related ideas, as well as jokes and stories from the
course. The triangle in the upper-right hand corner of the page that
shows the letters L, E, and P and the phrase "whence blackmail?" refers
to the rhetorical triangle of logos, ethos, and pathos, and a story I
shared about trying to teach this for the first time to freshman
writing students. (I tried to have my students brainstorm ways that one
might be persuasive, in hopes that we could then derive the
Aristotelian triad from their ideas. It almost worked, except one group
of students were really hung up on blackmail as a persuasive force,
which didn't really fit into a lesson on essay writing. Maybe it's a
form of ethos? Who knows.) An image excerpted from an episode of the
webcomic xkcd appears in the lower left hand corner of the page,
showing a sweating stick figure about to enter a room full of playpen
balls, with a dialogue balloon appearing from the right reading "Are ya
scared yet?" This represents a metaphor I brought up in class based on
that comic strip. The original comic represents adulthood and being
"grown-up" as the ability to define what grown-up means, including
defining it as the ability to fill your living room with playpen balls
and jump in. I often looked at the avalanche of ideas coming at us as
first-year graduate students as playpen balls that we had the right to
jump in. The ball pit metaphor transformed several times over the
semester, but it is one of my most memorable metaphoric images from the
class (along with Timmy the Terministic Screen, a character who shows
up later in the comic as well).

The page contains other laconic images and terse phrases that are
intended to trigger memories about rhetorical theory. The monkey in the
upper right hand corner, as well as the phrase, "Reading is a form of
life." in the lower left hand corner, allude to Henry Louis Gates's The
Signifying Monkey; similarly, other text on the page alludes to
Lacan
and to Derrida. The expressive image of the New Mutants
character
Danielle Moonstar, as drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz, serves in part to
represent the bewildered and alarmed graduate student taking in all of
this for the first time. (Really, the first time you read Derrida you
might as well be studying at the Xavier mansion or Hogwarts: it is
certainly bewildering.) It's also intended as an ironic inclusion of a
fictional indigenous comic book character, created by white folks, in a
comic that attempts to embody some indigenous visual rhetorical
traditions, made by a white academic.

That is a really wordy elaboration of what goes on in just one
especially meaning-laden page of the comic. However, as it is intended
to play out, this chain of remembering would take place mentally, after
the end of the course, as a way to refresh and revisit what we learned
(to be fair, with an emphasis on what I, as the comic's creator,
contributed and thought was most important). It is somewhat difficult
to measure the success of such a venture. In my later studies and
scholarship I have found it useful to return to this text as a reminder
of what I had already read. The comic has also been used by colleagues
at Michigan State University and Texas A&M to teach rhetoric and
multimodal composition. And I have returned to the strategy of using
mnemonic images in later comics I have created, although not in quite
as explicit a way as I attempted in this work. Overall, I am pleased to
consider it a successful experiment, and an encouraging one.

Instead of producing a modern-day artifact that looks anything like
a
codex, what I attempted to do was to use codexes, as well as other
mnemonic indigenous visual texts such as Lakota winter counts, as
springboards to ask the question: what are comics for? What can a comic
be for? If the extension of human memory was key to such visual texts,
can this also be done in a comic?

It is in this way that I believe my
project and a larger work like Codex Espangliensis share common ground.
Both works use indigenous visual rhetorical traditions as a starting
point to extend the potential of contemporary textual production: the
codex accesses the relationship between visual rhetoric and performance
to tell a new and transgressive story of resistance to colonization,
and my comic accesses the relationship between visual rhetoric and
memory to serve as a mnemonic for a large amount of rhetorical history
and theory. At the same time, both texts remain coherent sequential
narratives (as ambiguous as the one presented in Codex
Espangliensis
may be). Finally, I hope that this pair of examples shows how thinking
about visual rhetorical traditions – about shared acts of remembering
and forgetting, of reforging of connections – can be useful in
interpreting what is going on in a text with obvious historical
connections, as well as in imaging what can be done with a text as a
writer, artist, or creator.

6. The Legitimacy of Visual Texts

To conclude, in viewing decolonial histories of writing and the
history
of comics side by side, there is a clear duplication of efforts to
define visual texts as serious and legitimate in different academic
contexts. In both cases, the evolutionary model of writing that labels
communicating with pictures as both primitive and childish has caused
harm to producers of visual rhetoric. However, the scale of the harm
done becomes exponentially larger as a force of colonial power, which
destroys the libraries of entire civilizations, than as a force that
merely reifies the canon of literature and privileges alphabetic text
as more worthwhile than comics.

In Thierry Groensteen's essay "Why Are Comics Still in Search of
Cultural Legitimization," reprinted in A Comics Studies Reader,
he
decries the comic's lack of legitimacy: despite the comic's continuous
existence since Töpffer, "it is curious that the legitimizing
authorities (universities, museums, the media) still regularly charge
it with being infantile, vulgar, or insignificant" (3). He describes
comics as enacting the "imprisonment of verbal expression in the visual
system" and claims that "the champions of a culture which postulates
the supremacy of the written word over all other forms of expression
could only take this inversion as an attack" (6-7). Walter Mignolo also
deals extensively with the devaluing of non-alphabetic writing by power
structures and legitimizing authorities. In his afterword to Writing
Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes,
he
states that "one of the consequences of alphabetic writing in the
history of the west was its close association with speech and the
increasing distinction between writing and drawing" (293). In this
case, "the Greek legacy of the power of the letter to represent speech"
is the legacy that indigenous texts contend with (300).

In both cases, the authors access Derrida's critique from Of
Grammatology: that logocentrism leads to the fallacy that
writing
copies speech. However, Groensteen largely elides the part of Derridean
critique that identifies ethnocentrism as well as logocentrism in the
elevation of alphabetic texts as the highest of all intellectual forms.
Additionally, Mignolo is writing about the material extermination of
all but a few dozen manuscripts from before colonization, while
Groensteen is largely writing about texts being accorded the same
respect as literature. In fact, Groensteen's complaint that in regard
to a particular history of comics "over a half a century of French,
English, Dutch, Spanish, and even American comics [were] denied
existence because they weren't mass-produced!" seems downright petulant
in comparison to the destruction by fire of Mexica, Maya, Mixtec, and
Toltec works en masse by colonial authorities such as Diego de Landa,
so that only a handful remain today (Mignolo, Darker Side
71).

Rather than set up an argument about whose visual texts are the most
marginalized and why, it is more important to let this comparison force
the question: can we address how the power structures of colonialism
work with logocentrism to marginalize visual rhetorical traditions? Is
it possible that the same forces that led to the destruction of
indigenous works are still marginalizing visual works, in different
ways, through different material and historical processes? This
possibility opens up a fruitful and interesting space for people
working in comics studies, rhetoric and composition, and indigenous
studies to build theory and interdisciplinary conversation. I have only
begun to suggest brief examples of places where this has happened
already in the crafting of visual rhetorical texts; more probably exist
already, and many more can be produced if this framework is used as a
springboard.

In the end, there can never be only one history of comics or
rhetoric,
but many narratives grounded in time and place. We are constituted by
the multiplicity of stories we tell about ourselves, within and without
our scholarly work. Through this work, I would like to imagine comics
studies as a place where decolonial work can happen to constellate our
field as broadly as possible, and to draw productively from as many
places as possible, to craft a truly interdisciplinary field of study
that does justice to visual rhetorical traditions practiced by people
throughout space and time.

Haas, Angela. "Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual
Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice." SAIL: Studies in
American
Indian Literature 19.4 (2007): 77-100. Web. 23 July 2010.

Harvey, Robert C. "Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The
Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend."
In The Language of Comics: Word and Image. Robin Varnum
and Christina T. Gibbons, eds.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. 75-96. Print.

Mignolo,
Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,
Teritorriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan UP,
2003. 2nd ed. Print.

Mignolo,
Walter. "Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the
New
World." In Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in
Mesoamerica
& the Andes. Elizabeth Hill-Boone and Walter Mignolo, eds.
Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994. 220-270. Print.

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